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MonthJune 2006

It was revealed last week that 46 Australian patients received tissue implants from Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS), a company under investigation and now shut down by the United States Food and Drug Administration for illegally obtaining body parts from cadavers (many of which were diseased) and placing them in the stream of commerce.

A tragic scandal now has repercussions beyond the New Jersey shores where BTS is located. Patients who received body parts from BTS have filed lawsuits claiming to have contracted syphilis, hepatitis and other diseases from the bones and tissues they received from pillaged cadavers. The emptied corpses were sent to funeral homes in New York to prepare for burial. Yet, Michael Mastromarino, the CEO of BTS, and his colleagues had other macabre business objectives in mind, including looting the corpses for profit.

Following this recent conversation at Occult Design and much of conversation in the occulture blogosphere, I want to ask: what is the one book you think occulture/counter culture/weird/underground/anarchist/whateva type people should read if they’re interested in starting a business? I’ve seen notes from Peter Carroll’s Chaos in Business class, and it’s a start, but I’m sure a few of you have suggestions for a good full book that will help beginners get an idea of the process. I have some familiarity with it all from having done it, and from being involved in start-ups, but I’m looking for a good beginner’s manual, both for myself and to recommend to other people. I’ve already found a good book on finding a job but I’d like something good on business. It doesn’t have to be written for an occult audience, just be a good, approachable book on how to turn ideas into reality by starting a business.

The rule, though: only suggest ONE book. This will be fascistly enforced. Comments with more than one book recommendation will be deleted.

Grab a drink and fill that pipe full kids, this week the Vikings indulge themselves in the greatest Science Fiction writer of our time and a modern day christian/gnostic prophet, Philip K. Dick. While you may be familiar with the many films adapted from his novels (Blade Runner, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly among others) you may not be aware that in February of 1974 – around about the same time R.A. Wilson was having some strange visits from the Sirius star system and Tim Leary was busy bouncing his ethereal body up over the walls of San Quentin – PKD believed that a satellite, V.A.L.I.S, which might have been part of a Russian covert operation, part of a nervous breakdown, or perhaps even God itself, blasted a pink laser into his head. The subsequent effects of this experience left Dick speaking languages he did not know, accurately diagnosing illnesses he should not have been aware of, and living in two realities simultaneously…one as PKD, the other as an early christian under prosecution from the Roman Empire. What resulted for the rest of the world were two of the most unique and important science fiction novels in the history of the genre, “VALIS” and “The Divine Invasion”. AJ was our editor, satellite Viking Channel Null offers up our closing hymn.

What would happen if all graffiti writers overnight would write their name backwards? It is a cheap paperback clich? of occultism that reading the bible backwards will undo the universe while the devil supposedly can be heard by playing certain records backwards. It is enough to mention Babylon, that ancient dystopia of linguistic diversion, to remind you that messing with the structure of language has always been considered to be dangerous. It is the power of computers to generate all permutations that can made by combining according to different rules a certain range of tokens. It would not be hard to code a small software running on your pocket PC or Mobile phone that would tell you what combinations could be made with words you encounter while out on your game: the man-machine graffiti interface.

What I’m trying to say is this… these forums are here to help you develop, to help create a non-local superorganism that can adapt and maneuver within the larger body politic, and all you need to do is communicate to be a part of the overall community.

Communication is the essential manifestation of feedback that helps entrain, that provides the linguistic protoplasm binding together the cells of the superorganism